CV

Amparo Belloch Fuster has a Doctoral Degree in Psychology and has been a Professor of Psychopathology since 1987 in the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Valencia. She is also a specialist in Clinical Psychology (1999), and President of the Spanish Association of Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology (AEPCP). She was President of the National Commission of the Specialty of Clinical Psychology from 2006 to 2014. Her current research and publications focus on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum. She is the director of the Unit of Investigation and Treatment of Obsessions and Compulsions (I'TOC;
www.itoc.org.es) of the Faculty of Psychology of Valencia, where she also develops healthcare activity as a clinical psychologist. She is a member of the international and expert Obsessive Compulsive Cognition Working Group and the Research Consortium on Intrusive Fears. She is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of two research projects on the O-C spectrum, financed by the MICINN and the Generalitat Valenciana, within the Prometeo Program for research groups of excellence. She is the author of more than 200 scientific publications in national and international media and has directed more than 20 doctoral theses, five of them on the OCD spectrum that have been awarded with the Extraordinary Award of Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Valencia. She is a Collaborator Professor in national and international universities and is part of the Editorial Board of several scientific journals.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT

Current advances in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder
The introduction of typically cognitive concepts for the understanding and treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) at the beginning of this century meant significant progress in the efficacy of psychological interventions for this disorder. Until then, these interventions were based almost exclusively on Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). The currently called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has been consolidated as the treatment of choice for OCD, for any severity level. However, there remains a non-negligible percentage of patients who either do not respond to CBT, or have significant relapses despite having obtained good therapeutic results. This is partly due to the well-known heterogeneity of the disorder and the high comorbidity rates it presents, which requires greater diversity and perhaps flexibility in the application of effective therapeutic tools, in other words, greater individualization. In this conference we will review the efficacy and usefulness of these tools and the best ways to apply them in clinical practice to advance in the improvement of OCD treatment.